The Loves of Judith (3 page)

Then he pulled out the flat bottle he always carried in his coat pocket and I recognized the smell of the grappa Mother loved to drink. He poured a lot of liquor down his throat and a little bit of liquor on the fire, roasted the ribs he brought, and sang aloud:

And Moshe Rabinovitch, the strongest and oldest of my three fathers, caught me and tossed me up in the air over and over again, threw and caught my body with his thick, short hands. And when Naomi yelled, “And one to grow on,” and I soared for the thirteenth time, I saw a swarming cloud of wings threatening to cover the village.

“Look,” I shouted. “Starlings in summer!”

And at first glance, the raging nimbus did indeed look like a flock of starlings that had lost its sense of time. But it soon turned out that, thanks to the swings of Moshe Rabinovitch’s strong hands, I saw the locusts rising on the Valley that year, 1952.

Moshe’s face became melancholy. Naomi panicked. And Globerman said for the
n
th time: “
A mensh trakht un Gott lakht
—man makes plans and God laughs.”

Within five minutes the dull drumming of the Arab peasants was heard beyond the hills, coming out of their houses to the fields, armed with screaming women, long sticks, and noisy, empty gasoline cans to rout the enemy.

Globerman sipped more and more grappa from his bottle and served Moshe more and more meat, and in the evening, when all the children went to the fields with torches and bags, spades and brooms to kill the locusts, my third father, Jacob Sheinfeld, came, laid his hand on my shoulder, and invited me to dinner.

“All the gifts ain’t nothing. Money gets used up. Clothes you rip up. Toys get broke up. But a good meal, that stays in your memory. From there it don’t get lost like other gifts. The body it leaves real fast, but the memory real slow.”

That’s what Jacob said, and his voice, too, like the voice of the dealer, was loud enough to reach everyone’s ears.

A
STRANGE BIRD
,” that’s what they called Jacob Sheinfeld in the village.

He lived all by himself, he had a little house, a garden which was once well-tended, and a few empty canary cages, relics of an enormous flock that was now dispersed.

His field, which had once boasted a citrus grove and a vineyard, vegetables and fodder, was now leased to the village for common cultivation. His incubator he had already closed. His wife who had left he had already forgotten.

Jacob’s wife was named Rebecca. I knew she had left him because of my mother. Never did I see her, but everybody said she was the most beautiful of all the women in the village.

“What do you mean, all the women in the village?” the Village Papish amended. “All the women in the Valley! All the women in the country! One of the most beautiful women in all the world and in all times!”

The Village Papish was one of those admirers who are devoted to female beauty, and in his house he had splendid art albums he used to leaf through with washed, caressing hands, and sigh: “
Sheyner fun di ziebn shtern
—more beautiful than the seven stars.”

Like a distant, glowing nebula, Rebecca was sealed in his memory and in the common memory of the village. To this day—even after she had gone off and remarried and come back in old age, and managed to bring Jacob back to her before her death—they still talk about her here. And whenever a handsome woman comes to visit or a new baby is born who is very beautiful to behold, memory
immediately compares her with that reflection of the beautiful woman who once lived here, whose husband was unfaithful, and who went off and left us all behind, “wallowing in ugliness and desolation and the black soil,” as the Village Papish said.

I
WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD THEN
, and in the way whose beginning is hazy and whose end is painfully sharp, I understood that I was responsible for Jacob’s catastrophe and for his solitude. I knew that, if not for me and the deed I did, my mother would have granted his suit, given in to his pleas, and would have married him.

As in a box, I hid from my three fathers the secrets concerning them and her. I didn’t reveal to them why she behaved as she did or why she chose the one she did. I didn’t tell them that, sitting in my observation-box, camouflaged with branches and grass, I saw human beings, too, and not only crows.

Nor did I tell them about the mockery and scorn, my lot in school.

“What’s your name?” laughed the little children.

“What’s your father’s name?” teased the big children, guessing aloud which of the three was my real father.

They were scared of Rabinovitch and Globerman, so they clung to Jacob Sheinfeld, whose isolation and mourning made him an easy target. He also had a strange custom which stirred pity and disgust in everyone’s heart: he would sit at the village bus stop on the highway, saying either to himself or to the dusty casuarinas or to the cars passing by, or maybe to guests visible only to him: “Come in, come in, friends. How nice of you to come, friends, come in.”

Sometimes he seemed to greet them. He stood up formally, and as if he were reciting an ancient slogan, he said: “Come in, friends, come in, we’re having a wedding today.”

Often, when I went on a trip in the village milk truck with Oded Rabinovitch, we’d see him sitting there.

“Look at him how he looks,” said Oded. “If he was a horse, they would have shot him long ago.”

But not to Oded, and not even to his sister Naomi did I reveal what evil I had done to Jacob in my childhood.

T
HE NEXT EVENING
, after I finished my homework and helped Moshe with the milking, I washed, put on a white shirt, and went to Sheinfeld’s house.

I opened the small gate and was immediately wrapped in strange and wonderful smells of a meal. They slipped out of the house, but didn’t go over the hedge, and stayed in the yard.

Jacob opened the door of his house, and when he told me his “Come in, come in,” the smells grew stronger, winding around my neck and ankles, bearing me from the yard inside the house and filling my mouth with the saliva of excitement.

“What were you cooking there, Jacob?” I asked.

“Good food,” he said. “A gift for you on a plate.”

Jacob’s gifts weren’t frequent or public like the dealer’s gifts, but they were more interesting. When I was born, he gave me a pretty yellow wooden canary that was hung over my crib. When I was three, he folded yellow paper boats for me and we’d sail them together in the wadi. For my eighth birthday, he prepared a surprise that made me very happy: my big observation-box, painted with camouflage spots, equipped with holes for observation and ventilation, two handles, and a pair of wheels.

“From that box, you can watch your crows and they won’t know you’re there,” he told me. “But don’t use it for watching human beings. That’s not nice.”

Inside the box, Jacob had put up clips for paper and pencils and arranged a place for a bottle of water.

“And you’ve also got places to stick branches and leaves here, Zayde, so the crows wouldn’t feel nothing and wouldn’t run away,” he said. “By me, the canaries sit in the cage and I’m outside. And by you, you sit in a cage and the crows are outside.”

“They don’t run away from me,” I said. “They know me by now and I know them.”

“Crows are just like human beings.” Jacob smiled. “They don’t run away, but they put on a show for you. If you’ll hide in the box, they’ll act like normal birds.”

The next day, I asked Globerman to take me and the box in his pickup truck to the eucalyptus forest.

The forest stretched over the eastern edge, next to the common fields of the village, and beyond it was the slaughterhouse. The forest was dense and dark, and only one lane bisected it, the lane where the dealer would lead his livestock to their fate.

In its high crests, crows nested, and in that season you could still make out offspring who were almost as big as their parents and were beginning their flying lessons. The old crows showed them various exercises; and the young ones, who could still be easily identified in their first year by their disheveled feathers, sat bunched together on the branches. Now and then one of them would slip off his perch, flutter panicky in the air, screw up his courage, and return to his place, pushing his neighbor on the branch until that one would also fall and fly a little.

I sat in the box, I saw everything and the crows didn’t sense me. In the evening, when Globerman came to take me back home, all my limbs would be shriveled but my heart would be broad and happy.

J
ACOB SAT ME DOWN
at the kitchen table, a big, smooth table, where white plates gleamed like full moons, and silver dishes glittered next to them.

“In honor of your birthday,” he said.

His eyes tracked the expression on my face as I ate, and I neither could nor would hide my pleasure.

By the age of twelve, I knew what I loved to eat and what I hated, but I couldn’t imagine that food could give such profound and poignant pleasure. Not only my tongue and my palate,
but also my throat and my guts and my fingertips sprouted tiny taste buds. The smell filled my nose, saliva flooded my mouth, and even though I was still a child, I knew I would never forget the meal I was eating.

Strangely, my pleasure was accompanied by a thin grief that gnawed at the bliss and the taste and the smell that filled my body.

I thought of the simple meal I ate with my other father, with Moshe Rabinovitch, who generally stayed with potatoes, eggs, and the chicken soup he boiled so violently, as if he wanted to make sure that the chicken whose neck he had wrung and whose feathers he had plucked wouldn’t come back to life.

A man of habits and ruts is Rabinovitch. As always, even now he doesn’t talk during a meal. He chews his food very thoroughly, rolls it from side to side, and when his hand loads the fork again, I know that in another six chews he will swallow.

Only he and I were left at home. Mother was dead now; Naomi was married and lived in Jerusalem; Oded didn’t leave the village, but he lived in another house. As always, even now we sit alone, Moshe and I, eat and are silent. After he eats, he drinks a few cups of boiling tea, one after another, and I wash the dishes and straighten up the kitchen just as Mother would.

And when I finish, I get up and say, “Good night, Moshe,” because I didn’t call any of my three fathers “father,” and I go out to the little house in the yard, and there I lie down alone. In my bed, which is her bed. In her cowshed, which became my house.

J
ACOB DIDN
’
T SIT
at the table with me. He fussed around me, served, watched me as I ate, talked incessantly, and now and then,
if there was a space between two words in his mouth, he stuck in a piece of the omelet he had made for himself.

I was afraid he would tell me about my mother, because most of the people in the village felt a need to tell me about her or to ask me about her, but Jacob sat and told me a story; parts of it I already knew, about his childhood in the Ukraine, about his love for birds, about the river where the girls would wash their clothes and the fellows would sail little paper boats to them, with words of love written between their folds.

“Koreblik lubovi,”
he said; “love boats.”

“I was a little boy then, littler even than you, Zayde. And for me, that Kodyma River was big like the sea. Children have eyes like magnifying glasses. That’s something I once heard from Bialik. He was here in the village giving a lecture, and here’s what he said: the Alps in Switzerland are really high mountains. But they ain’t as high as the garbage heap in my grandfather’s yard in the village when I was five years old. The whole thing Bialik said in much nicer language. But Bialik’s words I ain’t got, and to talk like him I can’t talk.”

Big maple trees grew on the banks of the Kodyma. In the shadow of their branches the ducks rowed, their heads shiny green. In the thickets of reeds, the wind rustled, and the peasants said it was repeating the moans of the drowned.

At the bend in the river, a heavy black slate rock canted, and a weeping willow bent over it. Here the girls knelt to wash clothes, their knees pressed to the dark stone, their fingers turning red in the icy water, and their noses running from the cold. Jacob hid behind the blossoming branches on the riverbank and peeped at them. From the corner where the little boy was hiding, the movement of the water made the girls washing clothes look as if they were sailing on a boundless yellow-green sea.

One couple after another, the storks were plucked out of the sky and landed on their old chimneys and nests. They leaned their necks back, capered in their dances of wooing and fidelity,
to show that another year had passed and their love still endured. They pecked their red beaks together, exchanged gifts of spring, and their legs blushed with lust.

“Because love is love, for ugly storks just like for my beautiful canaries.”

The spring wind played with the dresses of the girls washing clothes, stuck the cloth to their thighs and then let go of it, and the sunbeams limned the bluish shadows of the veins in their wrists as they wrung out the clothes. The light, clear and fragile as porcelain, sketched the picture Jacob would call with surprisingly florid language: “The eternal picture of love.”

“A child who looks at beautiful women, he don’t want what a grown-up man wants,” he explained to me. “See, you’re still a child yourself, Zayde, and soon you’re gonna be a man, so you got to know all these things. It’s not the
tsitskes
and the
tukhis
a child wants, it’s much more than that. It’s not the beauty of this one or that one he wants, it’s the beauty of the whole world he wants. To pick the stars out from the sky he wants, to hug the whole earth and the whole life and the whole big sea he wants. And a woman, she can’t always give all those things. Once I had a worker here in the yard and I tell him what I’m telling you now. And he says to me: ‘There may be six women in the whole world who can give those things, Sheinfeld. But children don’t know them yet and grown-ups don’t meet them anymore.’ You remember that fat worker I had here?”